A serious voice arrested the willow switch: “I didn’t like to be scolded when I was a little girl, it used to make me cry.”
The willow switch dropped; the various recitations came to a sudden pause. “But she is such a dreadful bad girl,” urged the teacher.
Tessa Wadsworth lingered with her reticule, three parcels, a parasol, and _Sartor Resartus_ in her hands.
“_You_ come and be teacher and tell us a story,” coaxed the naughty child.
But Tessa laughed and moved on, to be stopped, however, by a quick call. “Tessa Wadsworth! I declare that you are a pedestrian.”
The voice belonged to a pair of blue eyes, and a slight figure in drab.
“Well, now that you have caught me what will you have?”
“I’ll be satisfied with a walk across the Park. Didn’t you know that I was home? Gus said that he would tell you.”
“Oh, I always manage to enjoy myself. How is it that you always stay poking at home?”
“I seem to have found my niche at home. Every one needs me.”
“Dunellen is a poky little place, but Nan thinks it is splendid.”
“I expect to spend the winter away from home and I don’t want to go. I don’t see why I must. Mother has been promising for years that the first winter that Dine was out of school I should go for three months, more or less, to an old aunt of hers for whom I was named; she has lost all her seven boys and lives on a farm down in the country with the dearest old husband that ever breathed. If I had such a dear old husband I should always want to be alone with him.”
“That sounds just like you. I wanted Naughty Nan to come home with me, but she wouldn’t or couldn’t. You can’t think how thin she has grown, and she mopes like an old woman. I had to coax her to laugh just once for me before I came away. I suppose that I oughtn’t to tell, but I will tell you; you are as deep as the sea. You know Dr. Towne?”
“Well it is all _his_ fault,” said Mary Sherwood in a mysterious low voice.
“Did he give her something to take outwardly and she took it inwardly?” asked Tessa gravely.
“That’s like you, too. You are always laughing at somebody. How he flirted with poor little Naughty Nan nobody knows!”
“No, I don’t. She was in earnest this time. He made her presents and took her everywhere; he always treated her as if—”